Fait accompli -- “a thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it" -- encapsulates 2020, an extraordinary year in which the American people were subjected to naked power grabs and shocking infringements on societal norms to a degree previously unthinkable. Here are the five biggest political scandals of 2020:
Presidential election tainted by the specter of massive fraud. In Joe Biden, the entire nation witnessed a non-campaign so awkward, uninspiring, and inept that it ranks among the most historically awful ever conducted by a major-party nominee for the White House. And now Americans are being instructed to accept, in the name of democracy, that this slumbering, stumbling contender accrued a whopping 81 million votes.
Controversies surrounding voting machine irregularities and sketchy ballot-counting weigh heavily. But the overarching reason to doubt the validity of this dubious outcome is the inflated totals produced by the hasty introduction of mail-in voting in several states. This process, acutely vulnerable to fraud under the best of conditions, was rushed into use due to the coronavirus pandemic. The manner in which key battleground states that Trump comfortably led on Election Day were suddenly flipped by next-day ballot dumps makes trust in the integrity of this new system of voting nearly impossible.
Biden won such a record low 17% of counties for a presidential “victor” that Democrats needed to score unusually substantial results in a few precise areas to pull off his “win.” Thanks to the early-morning appearance of bountiful Biden ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, it happened. Remarkable, isn’t it?
Politicians compromised by China. This scandal has the potential to explode as a dominant issue in the coming year. Americans are only just beginning to wake up to the fact that their elected officials have been cultivated to an astonishing degree by a foreign communist superpower.
Eric Swalwell and Christine Fang (Fang Fang)
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in February warned that the Chinese regime was courting U.S. governors through the National Governors Association. One notable example: A 2017 video shows Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey telling state-run media organ China Daily that he was eager to offer his state’s “semiconducters, electronics, aerospace, our defense industry, mining and ores” to China.
Meanwhile, Democrats were rocked by revelations that Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) has been caught up in a Chinese honeypot operation. An attractive female spy going by the name of Fang Fang “took part in fundraising activity for Swalwell’s 2014 re-election campaign, according to a Bay Area political operative and a current U.S. intelligence official,” the website Axios reported on Dec. 8.
“Swalwell’s office was directly aware of these activities on its behalf, the political operative said,” Axios detailed. Furthermore, “Fang helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s office …” Disturbingly, Swalwell remains on the House Intelligence Committee.
In 2018, the nation learned that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) had employed a Chinese spy on her personal staff for 20 years. To this date, Feinstein has faced no serious inquiry, much less any repercussions, over the incident. Will Americans be forced to accept a similar lack of accountability from Swalwell on this vital national security issue?
Coronavirus double standards. The examples are numerous. Finger-wagging elected officials and big-box-media-anointed “experts” lectured Americans on the urgent need to adhere strictly to rigid social curbs in the name of combatting the spread of the coronavirus and then promptly turned around to disregard the health protocols themselves.
Even the “science” used to justify the unprecedented shutdown of our nation has been flagrantly exposed as a hoax. Leading voices told Americans in 2020 that attending church could cost them their lives while Black Lives Matter street protests that fit with their personal political beliefs were blessed.
And then there was the “lockdown for thee but not for me” mentality. To put a face on this widespread elitist behavior pattern, why not make it the scolds who occupied the White House from 2009 to 2017? As we wrote in May:
“And then there are Barack and Michelle Obama. ‘Remember, we urge you to stay home except if you need essential health care, essential food or supplies or to go to your essential job,’ former first lady Michelle implored Washington, D.C. residents in a robocall at the end of April. Only a few days after shut-in commoners began receiving their telephonic spam from Michelle, their former president Barack was photographed enjoying a round of golf at the prestigious Robert Trent Jones Country Club in suburban Virginia.”
This is not hypocrisy. It is a double standard, one that fits perfectly with the progressive elitist view of the world. The entitled personages in our modern-day big-government nomenklatura truly do feel that rules are meant only for the masses, who must be carefully herded like animals for the greater good of society.
Big Tech censorship/Woke corporations used to police thought. Burying the Hunter Biden laptop story in the final weeks of the presidential election. Slapping a loaded fact-check warning label on President Trump’s tweets while flagrantly aiding Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign with their censorship, Big Tech fully outed itself as a dire threat to free expression on the internet in 2020, with social media goliaths Facebook and Twitter shamefully leading the way.
As all this was happening, major corporations in America embraced the radical Black Lives Matter movement in lockstep, using their substantial economic power to punish those who practice wrongthink.
Are your political opinions too conservative for your bank to accept? It will close your account. Disagree with the notion of “systemic racism” in the chat section of a company-wide conference call on Black Lives Matter? If you’re lucky, it will allow you to stay on for re-education. If not, you’re fired. This happened at tech giant Cisco in July.
With each passing year, giant corporations, most notably Big Tech behemoths, become more brazen in their politicization of the workplace and the commercial market. In 2020, the lurch was enormous.
Big-Box Media goes full Pravda. They have been trending in this direction for decades, of course. But 2020 was the year when the dominant establishment media in America tossed all pretense aside and became propaganda organs for a cause.
Whether shamelessly running cover for Biden or openly spouting Cultural Marxist dialectics on race and other socially divisive issues in the Year of George Floyd, major media outlets willingly cast aside any remaining shred of respect. They unapologetically carried water for a progressive establishment agenda that now seems to dominate most of the once-revered institutions in this country, from academia’s halls to the medical field and, sadly, even mainline churches.
The fait accompli encompassed in all five of these scandals is acceptance of the Big Lie. Americans are being challenged to their face by their ruling elites. They know you know you are being lied to: They don’t think you’re going to do anything about it. Perhaps this haughty attitude is the biggest 2020 scandal of all.
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Read more from Joe Schaeffer.
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